Simple PHP Code To Get last.fm Last Played Tracks

The other day I was approached by a friend (Julie Cheung) and asked if I could create some code that would display a list of last played tracks from last.fm. Julie isn't a PHP developer and so the code I gave her had to be easily understandable so that she could edit it herself if needed. The following code is what I came up with.

$username = 'philipnorton42';


$scrobbler_url = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/" . $username . "/recenttracks";


 


if ($scrobbler_xml = file_get_contents($scrobbler_url)) {


 $scrobbler_data = simplexml_load_string($scrobbler_xml); 


 


 echo '

'; foreach ($scrobbler_data->track as $track) { $string = '
• '; $string .= '
  
  '; $string .= '
  ' . $track->artist . '
  ' . $track->name . '
  '; $string .= '
  Played: ' . $track->date . '
  '; $string .= '
'; echo $string; } echo '

'; }

What this code does is to grab the XML feed containing the latest played songs from last.fm and convert them into a set of list elements containing some information about the tracks. This is done very simply by using the simple_xml_load_string() function, which works quite well for most situations and in this case only destroys a small amount of information that isn't really needed. Each track contains information about the artist and track that was played, including album artwork. Here is a breakdown of the information available in the feed, with the latest song in my own playlist as an example.

• artist : The name of the artist (e.g. "The Black Dahlia Murder").
• name : This is the name of the track (e.g. "Deathmask Divine").
• streamable : This is a boolean value (as a 1 or a 0) that states if the track can be streamed.
• mbid : The mbid is an ID of the song, but is lost when the XML feed is passed through the simplexml_load_string() function. This doesn't matter, however, as we probably won't need it when printing out the results.
• album : This is the name of the album that the track belongs to (e.g. "Nocturnal").
• url : This is a URL that links back to the track information on the last.fm site. For the example I gave above this is http://www.last.fm/music/The+Black+Dahlia+Murder/_/Deathmask+Divine.
• image : This is an array if different images for the album cover. Although the sizes are lost in the translation from XML the array translates to the following sizes:
  • 0 : Small image size, 34px by 34px.
  • 1 : Medium image size, 64px by 64px.
  • 2 : Large image size, 128px by 128px.
  • 3 : Extra large image size, 300px by 300px.
  You can see in the example above that I have selected the small image size in the array by using $track->image[0].
• date : This is the date and time that the track was played on (e.g. "21 Nov 2011, 15:28").

One addition to this code would be to stop it pulling in the entire feed on every page load, which isn't really needed. The addition of a small amount of caching code is ideal to keep page load times down (especially as we are relying on a third party service). We only need to store the data in a separate file for about 3 minutes or so (the average playtime of a song) so this time check is also added to the code.

<?php $username = 'philipnorton42';


$scrobbler_url = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/" . $username . "/recenttracks";


 


$scrobbler_cache_file = 'scrobbler_' . $username . '_data.cache';


 


if (file_exists($scrobbler_cache_file)) {


  if (time() - filemtime($scrobbler_cache_file) ?> 180) {


    // if the file was created more than 3 minutes ago then delete.


    unlink($scrobbler_cache_file);


  } else {


    $scrobbler_url = realpath('./' . $scrobbler_cache_file);


  }


}


 


if ($scrobbler_xml = file_get_contents($scrobbler_url)) {


 $scrobbler_data = simplexml_load_string($scrobbler_xml);


 


  if (!file_exists($scrobbler_cache_file)) {


    file_put_contents($scrobbler_cache_file, $scrobbler_xml);


  }


 


 echo '

'; foreach ($scrobbler_data->track as $track) { $string = '
• '; $string .= '
  
  '; $string .= '
  ' . $track->artist . '
  ' . $track->name . '
  '; $string .= '
  Played: ' . $track->date . '
  '; $string .= '
'; echo $string; } echo '

'; }